Booker Prize Longlist 2024 (updated with Shortlist + Winner)
The Booker Prize Longlist 2024 has just been announced. The longlist of 13 books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – has been chosen by the 2024 judging panel and features novels by Tommy Orange, Percival Everett and Rita Bullwinkel. (updated for Shortlist + Winner))
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The Booker Prize Winner 2024
For her book Orbital, British novelist Samantha Harvey has won the 2024 Booker Prize, making her the first female recipient of the esteemed literary award since 2019.
At a ceremony in London, she was presented with the trophy and £50,000 prize for her winning novel.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they havenever felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
Booker Prize Longlist 2024
More than half of the 13-strong longlist for the Booker Prize’s £50,000 award, known as the Booker Dozen, are American writers. There are three debut novels jostling alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize. Eight women and five men are nominated.
This year’s longlist spotlights stories about belonging and displacement, featuring literary heavyweights such as Richard Powers and Percival Everett. This year’s “glorious” list comprises “a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices”, said judging chair and artist Edmund de Waal.
Tommy Orange, who is the first Native American to be nominated, has been celebrated for his second novel, Wandering Stars, a story that spans centuries as it charts the pain of displacement and the search for belonging. The panel called it “a literary tour de force that demands attention”.
Percival Everett was longlisted for James, which reimagines Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. The judging panel said Everett’s novel “stands as a towering achievement”.
British-Libyan writer Hisham Matar is another past nominee who is nominated this year for My Friends, a story of two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration.
Yael van der Wouden is the first Dutch author to be nominated for the Booker Prize with The Safekeep.
Headshot by American author Rita Bullwinkel explores an amateur girls’ boxing championship in the United States that the judges described as “A gutsy, unflinching depiction of a young women’s boxing tournament in Nevada and a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics”
Charlotte Wood is the first Australian writer to be longlisted in eight years with Stone Yard Devotional. The panel said: “The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges.”
Six of the longlisted authors have previously earned a Booker Prize nomination. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers appears on the list for a third time with his latest work Playground, described by the judges as “Polynesian islanders prepare to vote on a billionaire’s seasteading project in an exhilarating novel that distils subjects as diverse as climate change and colonialism”
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Monday, 16 September while the winner of the Booker Prize 2024 will be announced on Tuesday, 12 November. The winning author will receive £50,000.
The 2024 judging panel, which consists of artist and author Edmund de Waalm, writer and professor Yiyun Li, novelist Sara Collins, Fiction Editor of the Guardian Justine Jordan, musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
The judges are looking for the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024.
Here is the Booker Prize Longlist 2024 in full
Yael van der Wouden – The Safekeep
Rachel Kushner – Creation Lake
Claire Messud – This Strange Eventful History
Tommy Orange – Wandering Stars
Charlotte Wood – Stone Yard Devotional
Recent winners of the Booker Prize include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and in 2023 Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song.
The Booker Prize Shortlist 2024
The Booker Prize 2024 shortlist has just been announced and for the first time in its 55 years, the award has five of its six shortlisted books written by women. It is now five years since a female novelist won the Booker despite one of the judges, Sara Collins, saying that much publishing is dominated by women.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft contemplating the world below.
A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.
The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Sadie Smith – a sardonic, strikingly sexy, 30-something American undercover agent of questionable morals – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her instructions are to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic svengali Bruno Lacombe and coax them into violent action, provoking the French state to crush them and their dangerous ideas for good.
At first Sadie finds Bruno’s idealism laughable – he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But over time she falls for his narrative about the futility of civilisation and his promise of a new dawn for humanity. His ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own devastating story, become impossible to turn away from.
Beneath this parodic spy novel about a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future lies a profound treatise on human history. Written in short, vaulting sections, Creation Lake is Rachel Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist – a work of high art, high comedy, keen insights and irresistible pleasure.
Held by Anne Michaels
- On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.
- John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.
So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
It’s 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season…
Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl-Isabel’ suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to desire – leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house in which they live – are what they seem.
James by Percival Everett
The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck begin to navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.
With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair must face the most dangerous odyssey of them all . . .
From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback. She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of her new life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.
But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.
The winner will be announced in London on 12 November.
Check out The 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Longlist
